“You were five.”

“Yes.”

“Where’d they send you?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You were five. They sent you somewhere.”

“I grew up in my grandmother’s house.”

“In L.A.?”

“San Francisco. Tiberon, actually.”

“Is she still alive?”

“No.”

“You said you had money. Did it start with her?”

“She had money. But I have my own.”

“Any brothers or sisters?” he said.

“A brother, Carey. He lives in Arizona.”

Jimmy didn’t say anything else. Sometimes when you let silence rise up, people will fill it and some people will say things, sometimes more than they meant to say.

“I left my grandmother’s as soon as I could,” she said. “A boarding school in Atherton and then Stanford. When I was sixteen.” She added the last with an impossible combination of pride and embarrassment.

“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” Jimmy said.

“I never thought it was supposed to be,” she said.

“I didn’t exactly make it to college,” he said.

She didn’t have anything to say about that.

“Can you tell?” he said.

“I don’t really know what to think about you,” she said.

“But that could be a good thing, right?” he said.

They both listened as “La Cucaracha” was played on the horn of a truck in the parking lot below. Jimmy went over to the window and spread the blinds. It was a lunch truck, chromed up, fancy. When you started your shift at five in the morning, you had lunch at ten-thirty. A Mexican man with a coin belt around his waist set up a folding table as the workers came out, all women as far as Jimmy could see. At least now she was talking to him like a person and not like a servant. Or a doctor. Or a priest. But he could tell she wanted this to be over, maybe was wishing she hadn’t even thought of this, had never had these questions about her father and murder and a time out of time, or at least had not given in to them.